Hi All,

I am new to this community and was hoping to get some good advice before my purchase of a new Media Center PC.  Have looked for a guide on these forums but seen nothing obvious so far (please point me in the right direction).  Basically im a few years out of date on current hardware and want to avoid any of the potential pitfalls with new technology.

My requirements are:

- Media Center PC for living room with HiFi AV style look and quiet/silent running

- Full 1080 HD output (i hear some chipsets only support this in certain formats?!?) and Blu-ray player

- TV Tuners for the up and coming HD free-view digital broadcasts starting soon.  Also would be good to have a feed from my sky+ box

- Decent outputs for HDMI/VGA/AUDIO - which is the best connection of VGA+seperate audio vs HDMI?

- Needs to be future proof

BUDGET £400-600 for the PC no monitor etc

Any help/advise would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Bridgstfer

I'd recommend an AMD 780G motherboard combined with an energy efficient AMD CPU.  Supports HD acceleration in hardware.

As for TV tuners you can get HD using a satellite feed already....

http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/297287.aspx

You can combine these a DVB-S satellite tuner with DVB-T to get a combination of both using TV Pack.   The BlackGold card has two of each tuner (http://shop.blackgold.tv/product/3540.html)

Taking a feed from your Sky+ I would not recommend as using an IR blaster is not very reliable.  Some people have managed to get encrypted channels working using a CAM with their Sky card so that is also worth looking into.

Should be no problem doing the spec you want for less than £600.  Most expensive parts will be the case, Blu-ray player and TV tuner.

I agree, I'm using a gigabyte ma-78GPM-DS2H with an AMD 4850e outputting 1080p over HDMI and spdif for 5.1 to my amp.
I'm using a hvr4000 for dvbs with the hacked dll for BBC-HD. It also does blu ray beautifully with a cheap n cheerful LG HDDVD/Bluray reader which comes with an oem power dvd 7.
As for case, I splashed out on a silverstone grandia GD02 without the front screen. The reason was its shallower than most pc cases allowing it to sit properly on my tv stand (or any other AV rack I'd imagine. I coupled that with a silverstone nitrogon cooler NT01 which suits the layout of the case fans that I shrouded.

Thanks for your feedback.

Ive been looking today at units from various OEM's (HP and DELL) and nothing is striking me as astethically suitable for my living room as they all look like PC's.  A quick search on ebay reveals a small number of manufacturers who are making HiFi looking components with very high specifications but im still not convinced im missing a trick here.

For instance one of them says this:

Due to the chipset limitation, only MPEG 2 & WMV Offload can support HD format 1920 x 1080p.

I dont want it to look like advertising so relevant search ive made are 'Ultimate Media Centre' and 'media centre HDMI'.  Also very difficult to tell how loud these machines would be when switched on or recording.

 

I think we both assumed you'd be building the PC yourself rather than purchasing one from an OEM.  You will struggle getting something within budget from an OEM.  If you can, I definitely recommend trying to build the PC yourself (its not that hard).  If you do this then you can pick yourself a case which looks like a hifi component.  Have a look at some of these sites for examples...

http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/acatalog/HTPC_Cases.html

http://www.cclonline.com/product-categories.asp?category_id=449

http://www.xcase.co.uk/c/118782/1/home-theatre-cases.html

You know what....I was just going to buy an OEM machine but now I am thinking it might be far more interesting to build my own MC-PC!

Are there any hardware guides you can recommend?

I guess what I need as a base is:

• Quiet Case/PSU (£100ish?)
• Motherboard - if I get one with HDMI socket do I still need a graphics card or network card?
• Lots of HDD and Ram
• Wireless Keyboard/Mouse/Remote
• TV card (HD ready one)
• Might save the blueray player for a while as my housemate has a PS3
• Vista software with Media Center

About time I bought myself a Christmas present!

www.avforums.com has a good few stickies on this subject...

Hi,

take a look a www.mediapc.tv - they have some nice looking systems.

Tony

Also, a timely article on Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200812-htpc.ars/3

Sony also makes a few nice ones, much better looking than the Dells or HP's, but much more expensive as well. 

bridgstfer:

You know what....I was just going to buy an OEM machine but now I am thinking it might be far more interesting to build my own MC-PC!

Are there any hardware guides you can recommend?

I guess what I need as a base is:

• Quiet Case/PSU (£100ish?)
• Motherboard - if I get one with HDMI socket do I still need a graphics card or network card?
• Lots of HDD and Ram
• Wireless Keyboard/Mouse/Remote
• TV card (HD ready one)
• Might save the blueray player for a while as my housemate has a PS3
• Vista software with Media Center

About time I bought myself a Christmas present!

I'm pretty happy with what I have going on, after some expensive trials and errors (specs essentially in signature).  The only thing I would caution you against is assuming that a system that can play Blu-Ray well can do HDTV well.  The 780G HD3200 chipset with an AMD 4850e was perfectly fine for Blu-Ray using ArcSoft TotalMedia Theater, but honestly couldn't hack HDTV through Media Center.  Picture quality was poor.  It was the CPU that was the problem, the HD3200 requires a Phenom CPU to do post-processing at any HD resolutions.  The difference was night and day for me and allowed the HD3200 to provide a picture that was spot-on to my TV's internal tuner.

If you go 780G, I strongly suggest a Phenom 9150e/9350e *or* a discrete graphics card.  Using a 4850e CPU + moderately powerful discrete graphics can be the less expensive way to go, plus it has the benefit that you can always try the built-in HD3200 as is and upgrade to discrete graphics later on if you're disappointed with it.  (If you change the CPU, you'll screw up DRM).

My main 780G HTPC has both a Phenom and a discrete graphics card.  I really don't remember exactly why I got the HD4550 in the first place (I'll have to go read that thread I made again - lol), but I'm very happy with it.  I could have probably put the Athon 4850e back in at that point and saved some $$ on electricity, but the thing is SMOOOOOTH.  I tend to prefer overpowered PCs anyway :)  The only reason you see "4GB" down there is because I got a great deal on it and needed 2GB for a second system.  The system ran perfectly fine with 2GB, even playing Blu-Rays with Media Center in the background.

But I'll tell you this much ... when I build the mini-ITX system for the bedroom next year, I'm not going to get a board with integrated graphics if I can avoid it.  I really though these onboard solutions had come a long way since I last used them 5-6 years ago, but they're still designed to be just barely good enough to make you want more from them.